Search: Syria Insta-Symposium
04 Oct Weekday News Wrap: Thursday, October 4, 2012
Turkey has struck back at Syria, after a mortar attack killed five Turkish civilians in a city close to the Syrian border. In an urgent meeting, NATO has urged Syria to respect international law. Turkey has also requested a response by the UN Security Council, but Russia asked for a day delay. Four UN Peacekeepers were killed in an ambush in West Darfur. At their next meeting in mid-October, Europe’s Foreign Affairs Ministers will reportedly consider tighter sanctions on Iran, including stricter limits on Iranian Central Bank assets in European...
10 Feb False Equivalences in the Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict – International Humanitarian and Criminal Law Perspectives
...strikes on numerous cities in Azerbaijan, including those with no military targets. For instance, an attack on a cemetery in the city of Tartar killed four civilians and injured four others attending a funeral. Solely residential dwellings in Ganja – an Azerbaijani city 97 kilometres from the conflict zone – were repeatedly targeted in overnight attacks, thereby increasing the number of civilian deaths. A recent Amnesty International report similarly confirmed that strikes carried out by Armenian forces killed and harmed civilians “not directly participating in hostilities and not in the...
03 Mar Unilateral and Extraterritorial Sanctions Symposium: The Human Rights Dimension of Unilateral Sanctions
...individuals (ibid). As he ably explains, in relation to sanctions in States such as Syria and Venezuela, it is difficult to extricate the homemade misery from that caused by extraterritorial sanctions: while, on the one hand, sanctions clearly contribute to the aggravation of an already precarious human rights situation, he says, “one cannot claim that sanctions have caused the current humanitarian crisis in Syria or that they are responsible for the collapse of the Venezuelan economy”(ibid 399). Against that background, it may, as he comes close to implying, well be...06 May Michael Kearney on the Palestinian Declaration
...of international law. Rather than follow the political question – that of whether Palestine is an actual state on a par with states such as Switzerland or Syria – Al-Haq has rooted its consideration of the matter strictly in international law. Al-Haq’s paper considers whether the PA exercises jurisdiction over the crimes set forth in the Rome Statute of the ICC, and whether the meaning of ‘state’ for the purposes of the Rome Statute can properly be interpreted to include an entity such as Palestine. Davenport’s paper stresses that the...26 Sep Weekly News Wrap: Monday, September 26, 2016
...situation. Middle East and Northern Africa The United States called Russia’s action in Syria “barbarism”, while Moscow’s UN envoy said ending the war was “almost an impossible task”, as government forces relentlessly bombed the besieged city of Aleppo. Yemen plans to complain to the U.N. Security Council over what it says are Iran’s weapon transfers to Houthi allies fighting the internationally recognized Yemeni government, the foreign minister said on Saturday. Four alleged members of al Qaeda’s Yemen branch, including a local commander, were killed in a suspected U.S. drone strike...05 Dec Weekday News Wrap: Wednesday, December 5, 2012
to protect Turkey against a Syrian attack. Additionally, NATO has warned Syria against using chemical weapons, with an immediate international response as the consequence. The Guardian is reporting that the former spokesman of the Syrian foreign affairs ministry has defected and is on his way to the US. Mali’s government has agreed to holding peace talks with two separatist rebel groups. The European Union is mulling a collective response to Israel’s planned expansion of settlements into the West Bank, while Germany’s Angela Merkel is nonplussed with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin...29 Apr Weekday News Wrap: Monday, April 29, 2013
According to a recent report, tens of millions of dollars from the CIA were delivered to the office of Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai over the course of decades, meant to buy US influence in Afghanistan. Syria’s neighbors are wary of a US-led intervention, should the US decide to take military action in the face of new evidence of chemical weapon use by the Syrian government–evidence that Syria claims is “inconsistent with reality and a barefaced lie.” Iraq’s media regulator has suspended licenses of ten broadcasters, including Al-Jazeera, accusing them of...
13 May Intelligence Sharing and Ukraine: The Jus in Bello
...list’, in theory, does not create clear problems for IHL. That said, this is far from simple when several states are involved, and various sources of intelligence are being collated. A recent example of this, and of the challenge of being the intelligence source to start the targeting cycle, is found in 2016 over Syria. In conducting airstrikes near Deir ez-Zor, coalition forces mistakenly targeted what were referred to as: “forces aligned with the government of Syria.” This strike involved aircraft from Denmark, Australia, the UK and the US, with...
20 Apr ICC Sanctions Symposium: Sanctions and Exceptionalism
...Central African Republic, Guinea, Uganda, Syria, Iraq all received special mention. They highlighted the financial and in-kind support it offered to the Extraordinary African Chambers that tried former Chadian President Habré, the Specialist Chambers in Kosovo, the Special Criminal Court in the CAR and even towards Guinea’s efforts to bring to trial those responsible for the brutal crimes against civilians during the 2009 stadium massacre. All this changed the day that the ICC decided to turn its attention to the atrocities in Afghanistan, one of its member states. USA Government...